I don't care how books smell either

[Lemurion]

I think we all hoped books would cost less: I know I did. When I saw Amazon's $9.99 price I thought it was too much; but that's because I was comparing ebooks to paperbacks and I wouldn't pay $9.99 for a $7.99 paperback.

I think $4-6 is a reasonable range for the ebook of a paperback. I'm not quite so sure about the ebooks of hardcovers. I've paid $15 for a Baen eArc without complaint, so that's my upper end, but I don't know what would be reasonable as a rule.

As for $1-2 for the ebook of a commercially published novel - that's just as unreasonable as $20 for the ebook of a $7.99 paperback.

[J. Strnad]

I certainly hoped that ebooks would be cheaper. Of course there are cheaper ebooks (like mine) but they aren't the bestsellers from big publishing houses.

As the price of ereaders goes down, I think we'll see more downward pressure on the price of ebooks simply because ereading won't be a pasttime limited to those who could afford a $250-400 device.

I have a love/hate relationship with the evolution of our media. I loved the square-foot album covers from vinyl albums and laser discs and hated to see them shrink when CDs and DVDs arrived. I love book covers, too, and fondly remember the Frank Frazetta and James Bama covers that got me into Conan and Doc Savage. Now book covers have to work at postage stamp size!

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Kirtai

It took me a while to change over to ebooks but they're pretty much all I buy nowadays.

The main exception is where the book itself is artwork; my most recent ones are the illustrated versions of "Wee Free Men" and "The Last Hero" by Pratchett.

The thing I miss most about pbooks is easy, convenient bookmarks. Bookmarking ebooks tends to be clumsy and you usually can't transfer them from one reader to another.

Curious. I've found book marking e-books to be much easier, especially with multiple book marks. Much better than a wad of post-it-note bookmarks (which I never have handy) sprouting out like a fungus on steroids or dog earring pages. The reader even catalogues and links the bookmarks for me so I don't have to "flip" to each one to see what it starts with.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

I have yet to use my ebook reader to kill a spider or cockroach, though I suspect that will be remedied in the future when more screens will have plastic backplanes...if I bother to buy one.

Oh, that brought delightful visions to mind, such as using a reader to level a short table leg, boosting a child in its seat at the table, pressing flowers, laying on the coffee table as a decorative touch, a wall full of e-book readers in leather cases...

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by Maggie Leung

...I do own a good number of books, but keep only those I wanna reread. I prefer to unpack them myself. (Movers will unpack, but your books end up in disarray.) Over repeated moves, I learned to take photos of my bookshelves beforehand. When my books arrive on the other end, I reassemble them like a jigsaw puzzle...

That points to a major benefit of having e-books over p-books: easy organization. P-book organization, at best, can be organized by either title or by author although they can also be grouped by genre. Then, when adding new books, one frequently has to shuffle books side to side and shelf to shelf to make room for the newcomers. E-books do not suffer from those restrictions. They are also a lot easier to schlep up four flights of stairs, etc.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by LDBoblo

Sorry, I should have corrected myself. I meant I wish doing a half-assed job were convenient and cheap. I'm familiar with printing and with binding, but I have yet to see a convenient, cheap homemade job that isn't rubbish.

I've bound magazines in the past that looked professional enough, I had people asking me where I had them done. It's not difficult or expensive; just tedious as heck and one must have an eye for detail.

[bjones6416]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Oh, that brought delightful visions to mind, such as using a reader to level a short table leg, boosting a child in its seat at the table, pressing flowers, laying on the coffee table as a decorative touch, a wall full of e-book readers in leather cases...

Do you remember the days when visiting children were always boosted up to the table on telephone books? :-)

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by bjones6416

Do you remember the days when visiting children were always boosted up to the table on telephone books? :-)

I've been trying to get the phone company to STOP delivering their blasted phonebooks to me for years. I don't have room for them and they are out of date the day I receive them. It's easier, more accurate, and faster to find phone numbers online.

[AGB]

Someone noted he (she?) liked the smell of books, the feel etc., and was also of the fountain pen persuasion, so to speak.

Well, I have never been a collector, and I honestly think that the "smell and feel" argument is nonsensical. I think it's a question of being a collector or not.

Years before I developed a hypersensitivity to many (extremely many) manmade materials, including printing ink and so on, I didn't like books. I never did; Dust collectors and annoyingly "in your face", just like LP's and later on cd's (or video films for that matter).

So, what I did back then was to hide everything behind doors. There's no need to be looking at it. It's nothing more (or less) than contents for me.
When I moved into audio production in 1998-99, I was propably one of the last persons in this country to learn how to edit on reel-to-reel machines, and although I enjoyed the physical aspects of it (having a physical piece of tape with a sentence on it hanging there waiting to to be inserted was something special. Six months later I was editing on computers, using digital all the way through the production chain.

Why? Well, it was easier, quicker and there was no big machines, no storage room full of useless reels and it was just the thing for someone like me.

I have worked on and off in the news paper and magazine industry (as a journalist, that is), and although I take notes by hand, even when talking on the phone, I don't keep the notebooks. I have a "system" when I work as a journo: Two small drawers, and every time one is full, it get shifted and the last one is tossed out. If it were up to me, I'd toss them out much sooner, but it's good to have one's notes as documentation.

I digress, I'm sorry, but my point is, that even though I'm a minimalist, like to have everything hidden away, and so on, I do like "old fashioned" stuff, the look, feel and smell of it - and my hypersensitivty to plastics, ink etc. have merely made it a tad more pronounced.

I use fountain pens (classic Lamy 2000's - another minimalist pen), my notepad (paper-thingy) is covered in leather, my travel bags are old fashioned and so on. My furniture is all Scandinavian minimalist design, mostly made from oak and ash, and there's wool on the couch and so on.

I do get the hankering for "feel" and "smell", I just think it's a collector's thing when it comes to books. I bet you that most of the people that use it as an argument for physical books", likes to display them in their home, and prefer to own the books rather than borrow them.

Btw, I'm hoping I'm allowed to attach a picture or two of my dream home. It's the "Ushimado Atelier" by some Japanese architect. The facade is made from burnt cedar which is then oiled, hence the black-brown colour. It has texture, it has everything, and it's about as empty as I'd like it (I'd need some speakers in there, though): Nothing to distract you while you work.

Sorry about the length of this. But it got me thinking.

[montsnmags]

AGB, that home is quite lovely. It is not for me (I have come from a home that had some small amount of modernist minimalism about it...beautiful, and I lived there for longer than I've lived anywhere, but what gives me comfort has changed), but that is not to say I can't appreciate its beauty.

But I am being off-topic. Sorry. So what I have done is created a thread in The Lounge forum called "Home Architecture":

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho....php?p=1044504

If this is your interest, I'd love for you to contribute there (rather than hijack here ).

Cheers,
Marc

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

That points to a major benefit of having e-books over p-books: easy organization. P-book organization, at best, can be organized by either title or by author although they can also be grouped by genre. Then, when adding new books, one frequently has to shuffle books side to side and shelf to shelf to make room for the newcomers. E-books do not suffer from those restrictions. They are also a lot easier to schlep up four flights of stairs, etc.

That depends how heavy the computer is to have to carry up 4 flights.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Even a 50 lb. monster is easier to schlep than 40 or 50 45-50 lb. boxes of books.

[Ea]

Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald

Even a 50 lb. monster is easier to schlep than 40 or 50 45-50 lb. boxes of books.

[JeremyZ]

Well, let's face it. Paper books are just a more sensory-rich experience. The feel, the sound, the smell. Some of us just like getting into the whole thing, not just the content. I like eBooks as much as the next guy/gal, but let's at least give credit where credit is due. I have a 75 year-old copy of Tom Sawyer, and an eBook is just not the same experience to read. (for better and for worse)

[Elfwreck]

Funny how comparisons to pbooks always involve older books, or special collector's editions; nobody talks about the joys of the pulp mmpb--the cracked spine, the curved-back cover that no longer closes flat, the brittle yellowing paper, the tiny text that runs so close to the center margin that you have to break the glue to read it, and then the pages start falling out...

I didn't get into ebooks to replace my letter-sized RPG manuals with the color artwork & detailed charts, nor to replace the hardcover Junior Classics collection I read as a child, nor to replace my signed first edition of The Fifth Sacred Thing. I got into ebooks to replace my dog-eared, torn-corner copies of Spider Robinson's Callahan's series, so I could re-read them at will without worrying about getting crumbs or coffee stains on the pages. To replace the second- and third-hand copies of cheap trashy romance novels I buy at yard sales for fifty cents. To replace the science fiction paperbacks that I used to put clear tape over the edges of the covers so they'd survive multiple readings. To get the classics--Alice in Wonderland, works of Shakespeare, Kipling--in a format my kids could read, highlight, and print out the sections with the poems they like to put in their rooms.

I started reading ebooks to replace throwaway paper editions, not collectibles. To replace the kind of paperbacks that, when my husband was living on the road, he tore out pages of after he'd read them so he wouldn't have to carry as much.